One of the fundamental capabilities for the world of many clouds is the ability to link various cloud environments into a single extended fabric with consistent capabilities, operations and management. While previous Unified Fabric innovation has focused on physical/virtual consistency of the DC fabric, this announcement brings that consistency to the cloud. This new technology from Cisco extends the existing networking capabilities, L4-7 services and manageability of your enterprise into public and provider clouds to create a single consistent, reliable, predictable environment for all your physical, virtual and cloud workloads. This secure and seamless degree of integration to the hybrid cloud frees you to run and move applications where it makes the most sense, on-demand, without compromise.

[Note: Join us for a Live Announcement Webcast February 5: Register Here]

Enterprises are increasingly moving to hybrid clouds to gain the benefits of public clouds – agility, on-demand provisioning, pay-as-you-go capability, and elastic scalability – along with the benefits of private clouds. Private clouds have some advantages, allowing enterprises to design and customize their infrastructure and control security. However, private clouds are usually less agile than a public cloud and may be limited in scale to meet peak capacity demands.

Cisco Nexus 1000V InterCloud is designed to provide the control and agility of a hybrid cloud to give you the best of both worlds while reducing costs and improving efficiency. It is a software solution deployed as virtual machines in the enterprise data center and public cloud, with three major components as seen in the above diagram:

InterCloud Switch, a Nexus 1000V “overlay” virtual switch that securely extends the enterprise data center with the cloud provider: The InterCloud Switch provides Layer 2 network connectivity across the entire system while providing end-to-end security by encrypting traffic between the two sites. It also provides local switching for the workloads in the cloud. This Layer 2 network connectivity allows full workload mobility between servers across locations while retaining the same IP address. In other words, with InterCloud Switch creates a secure, Layer-2 “Virtual Private Cloud” (L2-VPC) within a shared provider cloud.

Simple, single-pane management across enterprise and cloud workloads: The Cisco Virtual Network Management Center (VNMC) InterCloud presents a consolidated view of virtual machines within a hybrid cloud, i.e. across both the enterprise data center and the cloud provider. In addition, it manages security policies and virtual services in the cloud, and provides northbound APIs to integrate with cloud orchestration tools.

We'd love to hear from you! To earn points and badges for participating in the conversation, join Cisco Social Rewards. Your comment(s) will appear instantly on the live site. Spam, promotional and derogatory comments will be removed.

The Nexus 1000V Intercloud is quite impressive with what it offers, but I'm curious how the different layers of licensing might be impacted. Yes, we could expect that licensing should be no different as it would be for those already bursting out, but with the 1000V Intercloud I see the potential for vendors and service providers to modify their licensing in either direction; either favorable or unfavorable to the business.
I can see Oracle having fun with this.
Any thoughts?

Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of Cisco. The content is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Cisco or any other party. This site is available to the public. No information you consider confidential should be posted to this site. By posting you agree to be solely responsible for the content of all information you contribute, link to, or otherwise upload to the Website and release Cisco from any liability related to your use of the Website. You also grant to Cisco a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to exercise all copyright, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any original content you provide. The comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator.